The Election and After

The election which takes place to-day will decide a good deal, but it will not decide everything, and, curiously enough, some of the things which it will help to decide are not obviously in question, and some of the things obviously in question will not really be decided. One of the more or less hidden, or latent, issues is by much the greatest of all, and that is the value of the election itself and of any such election as an instrument of democracy and the claim of a parliament so elected to represent democracy. That obviously is fundamental, for it calls in question the whole basis of representative government and the rule of the majority as ascertained by the representative system.

Our Parliament has been called the mother of Parliaments, and it is a fact that the representative system on which it is based has served as a model for every country in the world seeking to emerge from autocracy to political liberty. But it is not unquestioned. In some countries, as in Spain and generally where political interest and organisation are undeveloped, it has been shown to be capable of almost complete perversion or sterility, and now, apart from these negative failures, it is directly challenged by other systems; it is challenged in Russia by the system of local council or Soviets, exercising large powers locally and themselves electing representatives to a general governing assembly. That is to say, the central governing assembly is not elected directly, but at one removed, and the local bodies exercise a great many of the powers communally exercised by the central body - are, in fact, little Parliaments. In Greater Russia these local assemblies are elected by workmen and peasants only, to the exclusion of all other classes, and this "dictatorship of the proletariat" is the essence of what is known as "Bolshevism," but this feature is not essential to the Soviet system generally.

This system is in Germany also challenging the older one, and it remains to be seen if it will prevail. In Eland the same idea is embodied in the Labour programme of what is know as Syndicalism, or the Guilds system, whose relation to the State has not been fully worked out, but which would go far to decentralise the powers of the State and to transfer them, at least as regards industry and all that concerns it - that is, virtually the working life of the people - to industrial bodies representing the workers in the various industries.

Obviously these conceptions, at least among ourselves and to a large extent also in Germany, owe their strength to mistrust of the existing system of representative government to disappointment with its working, to a feeling it is too aloof from the ordinary man and the workaday life of the country, placing power in the hands of a somewhat remote body elected at long intervals and whose election even then may be largely falsified by the time chosen or the methods adopted - by the power of money, the monopoly of political organisations and the wiles of politicians. It is a heavy indictment. How will its force be affected by the circumstances of the election now being held?

It is to be feared that it will not be weakened, but damagingly strengthened, and that, ironically enough, by the very men and the very proceedings whose object is to combat all such ideas and tendencies. For what do we see? Here is the immense machinery of an election set to work when the greater part of the electors are absent or so ill-organised and ill-prepared that they will either refuse to vote or will vote more or less blindly under the impulse of some catch-cry of the moment having no real and no lasting relation to their interests. There is this further quite possible contingency - that, owing to the extreme imperfection of our electoral machinery and the misguided refusal to include in it either P.R. or the alternative vote, it may turn out that a majority of representatives have been elected by a minority of electors, and that the resulting balance of forces in the House of Commons is fictitious and the majority which claims and will exercise power will have no real title to power. It is a serious danger, and the effect might prove destructive. For if Parliament has no authority, who has? And if the majority in Parliament proves itself out of touch with the true elements of power in the country, how is it to be held in check or made to do its duty? It may be said that these dangers and drawbacks have existed at previous elections and that they have not proved fatal or prevented a reactionary House of Commons from carrying on pretty comfortably even though its title to do so was clearly open to challenge. And that is true, but it is also true that times have changed and that what was safe and easy before will never be safe and easy again. In point of fact we may as well realise that there are new forces at work and that these will not tolerate the old abuses to an extent and in a fashion perhaps not at all commonly realised the workers of the country are likely to insist that justice shall be done to them and to the great interests of which they hold themselves to be in a special degree the representatives and guardians. And they will do this, it may be expected, not primarily or chiefly in regard to sectional interests as of wages and hours of labour, but rather in regard to those larger national questions in which labour claims a special voice.

Thus it may be expected that labour will expect to be at least genuinely represented at the Peace Conference. Also it is not likely to tolerate the continuance of war against Russia or anybody else, or the restrictions on the publicity or personal liberty which only a state of war could justify. It will demand not rely demobilisation and "transfer to reserve Z," but unqualified exemption from compulsory military service. If our representatives at the Peace Conference cannot establish an effective machinery of a Peace League or League of Nations, it will want to know the reason why, and will certainly not accept the failure. In regard to payment of the cost of the war, it will expect that realised wealth shall be called on to make sacrifice before the standard of life of the mass of the people is trenched upon. And there will be other issues of a like kind. But it will be said those who talk like this will have had their chance at the elections. Labour has put forward candidates for more than half the seats in the country, and if they are not elected whose fault is that?

There is force in the reply but perhaps not so much force as may appear. For, to begin with, Labour, even organised Labour, is always at an electoral disadvantage. It has not money - not least in the abounding degree; it has not organisation, or not one nearly so pervasive and adequate as the other great parties: it is short of education, short of men to act as leaders. But, beyond that, Labour has a new sense of power. It is organised as never before, and if it cannot work the old system of representation and government, why, then it is likely to want to try other methods. There is already a degree and a depth of discontent which perhaps is not sufficiently realised. It is to be feared that the present election, unfair in the moment chosen for it, virtually disfranchising vast masses of the electorate, distorted by appeals to passing passions and unreal issues, will have done nothing to increase confidence where it was shaken in the validity of our representative system, but quite the contrary. It remains to be seen what sort of a House of Commons will result.

The Labour party, as such, is at least likely to be considerably strengthened and if sufficiently strong and sufficiently well led, may go far to redeem the situation by giving confidence to the workers and securing for Labour an effective voice in the direction of affairs. In this ti will be able to count the unstinted support of all that is sound in Liberalism. But we should not delude ourselves if we did not realise that there is danger, and that this danger can only be counted by a statesmanship immeasurably superior to any of which our present rulers have given recent evidence.